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The performance difference with r300g is smaller than the difference between Clang and GCC, for example. And r600g is at about 60% on recent cards, sometimes 90%.

And how is the performance difference on cards that are not out of production? How is the openCL performance? What is the power consumption and cpu use when watching HD video? I could go on but you should be already able to see the vast difference.

They were stuck because their efforts were being put into more worthy efforts.

What are you talking about? They were stuck because of not accepting GPLv3, a purely licenced based decision. Being GPL-free has long been one of FreeBSD's stated goals, again a licence-based goal.

I'm not saying this is in any way wrong of them, they have their philosophy/ideology regarding software licencing which differs from that of FSF and it's as simple as that. But your attempts at presenting FreeBSD as making choices on a technical level rather than that of licence-philosophy falls rather flat.

That's just splitting hairs. The “Permission is hereby granted…” sentence and the last paragraph are verbatim copies from the MIT license and the actual conditions are a verbatim copy of the 3-clause BSD license.
There is absolutely no practical difference to the stock 3-clause BSD license. The slightly different wording is just stupid license proliferation.

Even if it was a 100% speed up they still fail to come remotely close to the blobs.

Nonsense.

Results were within 50% of the blob, often more. Add HiZ, new DMA stuff and recent general speedups and you're really close. User Verappan did benchmarks recently showing more than 60% on most benchmarks, but openbenchmarking is b0rked at this moment so I can't link it. At the same time, the lack of OpenMP slows down Clang code by a factor of 4 on most computers. 60% of the performance is "not remotely close", but 25% is sufficient. Nice logic

Of course, you have to be aware that there was a VRAM allocation regression exactly at the time of Michael's article, which is why some of the test results are wrong (Reaction Quake, xonotic, etc.) The regression has been resolved since then and results back to normal across the board. Well, mentioning that would be the honest way to go about it, anyway.